The latest innovations in Social Media Advertising

If you are one of the many advertisers running Branded Content or Influencer Marketing campaigns, then you know it’s a powerful way to broadcast your messaging to new audiences leveraging brand loyalty. However, if you run these campaigns on social without media spend behind the posts, you are leaving money on the table.

All too often, a majority of budget is spent on the content creation and Influencer/Publisher payment, without carving out any funds for media promotion. It is a huge mistake to think that organic reach alone will get your content the eyeballs it deserves let alone the coveted viral status.There is an extremely high volume of content created every day with around 300M photo uploads per day alone (Gizmodo, 2012). However, there is a diminishing and scarce amount of user attention given the average amount of time a user spends on Facebook per day is only 20 minutes (Business Insider, 2015). Relying on organic reach to push your content to new levels of exposure just won’t cut it these days.

Media amplification is a must for Branded Content. In illustration of this point, CitizenNet discovered that Branded Content receives 91% less organic reach than other non-promoted posts.

The chart above showcases how Branded Content takes the biggest hit in terms of Organic activity when compared to other non-promoted posts.

Furthermore, Branded Content without media spend only reaches 2.4% of page fans whereas other non-promoted posts average around 11.7% of page fans. What this means is Facebook wants you to pay to play. The algorithm recognizes the Branded Content and reduces the delivery.

Before you get upset at this fact, realize that requiring media spend behind content is a good thing. Without it, it is impossible to measure the full effect a campaign has. Media spend allows you to bucket audiences and measure engagement and interaction. With boosted media you can:

Identify top audiences segments

Discover highest performing creative

Control audience saturation

Craft message sequencing

Most importantly, determining key learnings and insights for future campaigns are invaluable and a necessary step after every social media campaign. Without the takeaways derived only from media spend reporting, brands are doomed to spend money on poor audiences and witness dwindling performance. Social media can tell you what your next creative efforts should be, as long as you are listening.

To learn how CitizenNet can take your Branded Content to the next level, contact one of our experts today.